To Defend Freedom We Must Act As Free People

The question of Zionism and the question of the Jews continues to take a central, a dividing and a defining place in the internal cultural wars and the internal war of values in the West.  

Tell me where you stand on Zionism, and I will tell you where you stand on a range of other issues. If you’re against the Jews having their state, you’re either hard right, or, more common in Europe these days, hard left.

The polarization is so fierce that there is even a strong opposition to having a dialogue.

Me standing on this stage right now is, in the eyes of many, quite controversial. I have been given quite some grief already simply for being here. “How can you share a stage with her? Haven’t you read what he has said?”

The underlying message being: Shout! Don’t talk! Don’t discuss!

People prefer to shout at each other from two mountain tops instead of meeting in the valley. It seems to be more about personal identity and virtue signaling than learning from each other.

I am, by nature, a doubter. I’m very seldom sure of anything.

And I’m skeptical of the doubtless. When I meet people that just know that they are right – it scares me. It makes me ask: “What if they had been exposed to the opposite idea in their early life? Would they then be absolutely convinced of the opposite?”

I ask myself this question when I meet people from the angry anti-Israeli mob that has taken over the streets in the West. I think they are wrong and that some critical thinking would do them good.

But I think the same when I meet people that support and defend everything the Israeli government says or does.

I see it as contrary to what the idea that has taken concrete form in the state of Israel is all about: Not only to provide Jews with a protective shelter from deadly enemies, but also freedom. A shelter from a tyranny of opinion. Opposition to alignment. Freedom as an obligation to think for yourself, make up your own mind and stand firm defending your ideas and values.

This is what makes Israel the outpost of freedom. This is what gives meaning to the statement “we are all Israelis”.

We are.

Even if parts of what we call the West were more than skeptical to the establishment of modern Israel in the ancient land of the Jews, we also ended up being a kind of midwife.

The controversy never stopped, but the new state also ended up symbolizing the values we build on more than any other state. It became a reliable friend and ally.

And if a true friend sees his buddy making mistakes or taking a wrong path, he tells him. Because he wants the best for him. Because they are friends. And a true friend listens when a true friend tells him unpleasant truths. It doesn’t destroy their friendship, but strengthens it.

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Let us all agree on the fundamental virtues of Zionism. Let’s agree on the right – and necessity – of Israel to exist, to flourish and to defend herself. All of which she does in an impressive way.

A year and a half ago I sat in a small kitchen in a kibbutz in Israel. At the table there was one descendent of Jews who had fled Yemen. The roots of another were in Iraq. A third descended from Poland. A fourth from Argentina.

It was the day after the first anniversary of the seventh. October 8, 24. And as we sat there sharing some oranges, the sky was full of evil dragons of steel. A big number of missiles from Iran were headed towards us. Hezbollah was shooting rockets as we spoke. And in the news we heard of a ground attack in the north.

But we felt safe.

And I thought: This is it. This is the physical manifestation of the idea of Israel. Protection. Safety. It is either this – or it is prosecution, violence and death.

It is truly impressive that the people who since the reestablishment of Israel have been attacked tens of thousands of times by hostile neighbors have managed to defend this tiny country.

But what is more impressive is how these few people have enriched the rest of the world with technological inventions, science of all sorts, with culture and by showing us all a shining example of bravery, patriotism, organization, discipline and leadership. And of standing by one’s identity, values and heritage.

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As an anti-Zionist, there is one prerequisite you need more than anything: Ignorance. Ignorance of history. Ignorance of the radical Islamism that drives Israels genocidal enemies. Ignorance of what Israel is and why. Ignorance of the idea of Israel. You must reject a nuanced understanding of the world.

But we who support Zionism must also be careful not to mirror exactly that.

As Nietzsche says it in the famous quote: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you." (Quoted without calling anybody a monster).

In a polarized debate it is easy to end up erasing the moral distinction between yourself and your opponent, and adapting the very way of thinking, that you started up opposing.

You become absolutely convinced that you are right. You become totally focused on how wrong your opponent is and on finding arguments for how he manipulates, and how full he is of contempt and hate, that you end up hating him. As a result, you lose the moral high ground and become indistinguishable from the behavior you set out to oppose.

The moment when we align behind anything that the Israeli government does, I’m afraid we have fallen into that trap. Alignment is necessary in a mechanical engine – but it is the contrary of freedom in a society.

I love a joke I heard once when I made a speech at a Jewish cultural center.

Something I said led to discussions among the audience, and I guess you could tell from my expression that I regretted having said it.

To comfort me a man came up to me and said: “Let me tell you a joke. A ship was wrecked and everybody died.

But 30 years later people visited a desert island – and found one of the passengers alive. He was a Jew. And when they asked him what he had done on the island all these years, he took them to the northern part and showed them a synagogue.

“Wow!” They said. “Impressive. So you have spent 30 years building this?”

He shook his head: “It took me 15 years”.

“So what did you do the other fifteen years?”

He then took them to the southern part of the island, where he had built another synagogue.

“Wow!” They said. “So you pray in this synagogue half of the time and in the other synagogue half of the time?”

“In the other synagogue?” He asked angrily. “No, no, no! In that other synagogue I never set my foot!”

Disagreement is energy. It’s what takes us forward, what shows us the complexity of a matter and makes us wiser. Opinions need to be contradicted, discussed, developed and then win – or vanish.

Giving in to the rhetoric of the likes of Smotrich and Ben Gvir just because they are Israeli politicians is betraying our duty to do this.

It is intellectual laziness if we say: We side with Israel and whatever those in power in Israel say or do, we support.

I guess we all support the ideas on which the United States were founded – which is exactly why many of us are so opposed to Trumpism. In our view he represents the opposite of these ideas.

In that same way the radical elements in Israeli politics and social life do in my view not represent the spirit of Zionism. They betray it with their vulgar populism and, dare I say, racism. Some of them resemble the extremists that want them wiped out.

They have gazed into the abyss for so long that the abyss now is gazing into them.

I know not all of us agree on this – and so let us discuss it. That is exactly the privilege and the responsibility of freedom.

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The saying goes that where there are two jews together, there are three opinions. That is what sparks the dynamics of the country in so many fields.

But sometimes when a hundred non-Jewish supporters of Israel meet – there is only one opinion. That opinion being that whatever is done by the Israeli government is right.

It is wrong, because everything that the government does is not right.

It is wrong, because it sucks out the oxygen and the dynamics of debates and leads to stagnation.

It is wrong because it locks us up in the so extremely important debates with antizionists without much chance of winning them over as we sometimes are forced to try and defend what we cannot defend.

It is wrong because it strongly weakens our defense of the fundamental positions upon which we all agree.

It is wrong, because there are several wars going on – and an extremely important one is about the narrative. Loosing this war is what isolates Israel. It will be extremely costly and damaging in the long term and Israel could slide into something unrecognizable.

What should our answer be when we are met with: “How can you think that every single thing that the extremists in the Israeli government do and say is right” – followed by several examples of outrageous statements?

In my opinion there is only one good answer: “I don’t”.

There is so much that must be defended in this debate. But we risk not being able to do that if we constantly force ourselves to defend the indefensible.

Because when the defensible and the indefensible ends up in the same pot – the pot as a whole becomes difficult to defend.

The worst thing for a CEO of a company is having a board of pleasers. Flatterers. Yes-sayers. Leaders of companies need opposition and critique from their board and their owners in order to avoid making big mistakes.

The exact same thing is true for political leaders – as pointed out by Machiavelli. They are in danger when they are surrounded by flatterers.

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Don’t get me wrong here: I understand perfectly well why many of us are reluctant to criticize Israel in any way.

It’s because she is all but surrounded by yes-sayers. She is surrounded by deadly enemies. And in the global debate Zionism is treated as an evil ideology.

No other country on the planet is criticized and condemned as much and as unfairly as Israel. The fact that there are far more UN-resolutions against Israel than against all other countries combined tells it all. Is Israel really worse than Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, North Korea, Sudan, China, Nigeria, The USA and Belarus combined?

Did Azerbaijan, Germany, Turkey, Liberia, Panama, Pakistan or Bangladesh come into existence in a more democratic way than Israel?

Do the Turks have any legal right – or any argument at all – to occupy Northern Cyprus?

Everybody – even the people passing uncountable resolutions in the UN and the people shouting “from the river to the sea” in the streets – know the answers.

But there is an obsession with Israel. There is an obsession with the state of the Jews. There is an obsession with Israel because it is the state of the Jews.

There is – as there has always been – an obsession with the Jews.

As refugees they have been prosecuted for mingling too much with locals – thereby infiltrating other nations.

They have then been forced into ghettos – and then prosecuted for isolating themselves too much from others and creating parallel communities. States in the state.

They have owned too much, and therefore been forbidden from owning land and buildings, thereby being forced into trading. Then they have been accused of being suspiciously good at trading.

They have been prosecuted for being a stateless people.

And now people around the world unite around the idea that they are not entitled to a state.

It is called anti-Zionism. And it is the modern face of antisemitism.

It is Der ewige Judenhass.

So I do understand people who say: “Israel gets her share of critique. Of condemnation. Of attacks. So let us have her back. Let us support her in her struggles. Let’s not forget that she stands up for and fights for our values”.

But what are our values?

It’s freedom of thought. It’s discussion. It’s our obligation to form our own opinions and express them. Also, to our closest friends.

If we don’t do that and become uncritical yes-sayers for the Israeli Government we betray the very idea, that Israel is based on.

The outpost of democracy is fighting on behalf of the whole free world. But this outpost also needs the support of the free world. This support is undermined by extremists and by the fact that the prime minister doesn’t distance himself from these extremists.

So let us agree on the fundamentals. Let’s defend the fundamentals. But let us, in the spirit of freedom and democracy and Zionism openly discuss and disagree on everything else.

Let’s do that because it’s right – and because it puts us in a much stronger position when we take on the enemies of Israel and the enemies of freedom.

We are in a better position to defend freedom when we act as free people ourselves.

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I will end with some words on the blind angle in the global debate on democracy on the one side and Islamism on the other side.

I have been in many debates about the war in The Middle East and the Western reactions to It. It has given me an insight into a political alliance that at first glance seems difficult to comprehend, but with a closer look becomes understandable and quite disturbing.

It is the alliance between the far-left, secular political movement and the religious, islamist right.

How can this alliance, that we see all over the West, be possible? How can people, that seem to have nothing in common march together under the same slogans?

My theory is that we’ve become so secular and so rational that we’ve grown blind to the irrational values that our societies and cultures are based on.

Religion plays such a small role in Western daily lives today, that many people are not even aware of the fact that our conception of human beings and therefore also the way we have organized our societies, to a large degree is based on Christianity.

This ignorance of the importance of religion makes us blind to the enormous force of religious motives in politics as well as in wars.

Religion doesn’t motivate us anymore – and many of us have become unable to understand, that it motivates others.

I have stood in panels where people have blatantly rejected that religious motives are driving the wars against Israel.

It is a denial of the obvious.

The attack on the 7^th was called the Al Aqsa Flood. The declared goal was drowning Israel in Islamism. Men shouted “Allahu Aqbar” when heads were chopped off. Jihadists in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Iran joined the war, believing they became martyrs if they died.

But even if people who commit terror acts explicitly say that their motives are religious – in manifestos, in personal letters, and in private videos – many secular, rational people can’t understand it. And as they can’t accept what they can’t understand – they deny it.

And so, they replace other people’s religious explanations for their actions with their own rational and political ones.

They deprive other people of the right to define why they do what they do.

The story line is always the same. Every Islamic attack is explained by claiming that the people doing it are victims. Victims of history. Victims of politics. Social victims. Cultural victims. Victims of Western history and Western values and Western hegemony.

Victims of everything that is so intensely hated by the far left.

And so the far left says: This proves our point. The West is evil – just look at its desperate victims.

Hence the before mentioned alliance.

The fact is that the Islamist war on the West is motivated by exactly what the people fighting it say is motivating them: Religion.

Some of the 9/11 terrorists were studying in Western universities. They were not poor. They were not marginalized. They were not victims of Western politics or history. But their minds had fallen victim to a religious and political totalitarian ideology that promises people glory in the afterlife for heinous acts committed in this life.

We should believe people when they themselves say they believe they will get to heaven for killing others.

But many of us don’t.

Hence the enormous blind spot into which people read all kinds of explanations.

This effort to try and explain and rationalize why others do what they do makes people blind to what is actually going on.

Secularism, reason, and logic have opened our eyes to rationality – but at the same time made us blind to the irrational and its enormous force.

The blindness doesn’t only stem from the loss of religion but also from historical ignorance.

We are the continent of Al-Andalus. Of the Ottoman Empire. Of the 30-year war. Of the Crusades. Of the burning of witches.

We have ourselves killed and died in the name of religion for centuries.

We wouldn’t be blind to what happens today if we knew our own history.

But many of us don’t.

Many of us can’t see that there is a civilizational war. They can’t even see that there is a conflict.

Islamist jihadists are brainwashed by an all embracing religious, political and nationalist ideology.

The absurd thing is that many of us are brainwashed by the paradigm of reason and logic.

Rational thinking has taken over to such a degree, that we’ve not only lost our own religion – we’ve also become incapable of understanding that other people have a religion, and act because of it. Even when they openly declare that that is what they do.

It is difficult to defend yourself against something you can’t understand and can’t see. It is impossible to defend yourself against something you don’t even believe exists.

This is why we could lose the civilizational war we’re in.

It’s still not lost.

But if some of Israel’s neighbors and the mobs in Western streets get their will, if anti-Zionism wins and Israel falls one question will be looming over the Western world:

Who’s next?

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So let’s open our eyes.

Let’s defend our values.

Let’s defend Zionism and Israel.

But let’s do that with open eyes and a critical approach.

Defending everything that the Israeli government says or does, is not defending Israel.

Sometimes the best defense of Israel is criticism of certain people that are in power in Israel and criticism of the privileges that are given to some Israeli citizens because of their religion.

We should not defend anything that is Israeli just because it is Israeli.

We should not defend certain individuals just because they happen to be in power in Israel.

We should defend our values.

That is why we should defend the outpost of freedom in the Middle East.

That is also why we should not do it unconditionally.